This. Up until 9/11 hijackings were treated as hostage situations and such an incident would have been dealt with by negotiating with the hijackers for minor concessions such as releasing elderly, women, and children passengers with the goal of eventual surrender, while simultaneously gathering intelligence on the situation inside so Special Forces or HRT could start making plans to storm the plane, if necessary. As such, the conventional wisdom at the time was to remain quiet and passive if a plane you were a passenger on was hijacked. However, once it became obvious to the passengers on Flight 93 that they were going to die one way or another, the obvious thing to do was to just accept it and do what was necessary to minimize the death and destruction on the ground.
The Capitol building was evacuated at 9:48, meaning the likelihood of any individuals dying on the ground was probably very small.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a948capitolevacuate
And how would the passengers be expected to know either the target or whether it was evacuated?
Was the target the Capitol building?
How could you know that? Unless…
It was his first suicide hijacking. I imagine he was quite preoccupied with just flying straight and hitting the building at all.
There is no evidence the plan was specifically meant to cause the towers to fail (which they could not have known they would) it was meant to just at least cause them to burn (which they knew it would as long as they hit them.) Had they not collapsed it would still have achieved its intended purpose, which was to cause a truly spectacular catastrophe to New York City’s tallest buildings. As Smapti has already pointed out, had they not collapsed on their own - which I knew they likely would when I saw it live for the first time, but you never know - they would have had to be taken down anyway, they were hopelessly wrecked. And if they don’t fall, they burn all day and people keep jumping out and it’s a horror that goes on and on for hours. It would have been just as evil a triumph for al-Qaida.
What is somewhat more stupid, if you think about it from their perspective, is why they’d hit the Pentagon. I understand its symbolism, but it is far too large and low-slung an edifice to destroy with an airliner - actually, even calling it “a building” is kind of an understatement.; it is really many connected buildings. If one looks at aerial shots of the Pentagon after the attack one of the things you realize is that in most of the place, you literally could have stayed in your office and kept working. People working on the other side - this is literally true, supported by many sources - only knew the Pentagon had been attacked because they saw it on TV. A much more terrible effect would have been to hit the White House or Capitol, which would have completely destroyed either.
Is there a fancy term or short phrase for “Monday morning quarterback does not understand that in the midst of the crisis the people involved did not and could not have as much information about the situation as we do at present”? Because there should be.
The point I was trying to make was that the passengers were not heroes in the sense that they helped save anyone. Even if they did not decide to react, the plane would probably have been shot down.
IMO we need to stop this “Us vs them” mentality. Cowards vs heroes as so many people like to think about 9/11. It certainly won’t stop terrorist attacks or even deter them from trying.
Maybe it’s just my faulty memory, but I seem to recall hearing back then that the intended target of the downed plane would have been the White House.
The hijackers before September 11th apparently realized the incredible difficulty of targeting the White House and changed their plans. It is a low lying building which is not visible from a high altitude. And correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t the secret service have missles which could shoot down a plane?
Wow… this just reminded me of something incredibly coincidental. 7 years exactly before, on September 11th 1994, a small plane crashed outside the White House. Here’s a link to it below:
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a091194frankcorder
And the passengers were supposed to know that how?
And the plane would not have been shot down. Air Force jets were scrambled without time to arm. The pilots intended to ram the airliner.
So lets stop doubting the bravery of the passengers (and before you try, the Air Force pilots), deliberately causing your own death, even if it seems certain, is still damn hard.
They also knew that if they didn’t act, others on the ground could die.
A Stinger won’t change the course of an airliner enough to not cause devastation even if it missed the WH or Capitol.
In a war zone, no one cares where a plane goes down. The middle of Washington D.C is a different story.
IIRC, it was thought that the Pentagon wasn’t originally the intended target, i.e. maybe the hijacker steering the plane erred and found himself in a rapid descent towards Arlington instead of Capitol Hill.
Good point. In light of this new fact I retract my first post as you have clearly proven beyond the slightest doubt that it was imfuckingshitasspossible that the hijacking and subsequent passenger revolt on board Flight 93 was anything other than a carefully staged event.
Letting them make calls was actually completely logical and all the hijacking teams did it. The reasons are pretty straightforward: first, without guns they had no way to impose mass submission on the passengers. Plus the mission didn’t require it. They just needed them out of the way for a short time. Letting them make calls distracts them from taking action. The real issue with the last flight was that it took off late, which allowed those making calls to figure out what was about to happen. So you could say that the hijackers should have tried to prevent them from making calls, but already undermanned they probably decided it was best to just stick to the plan. An attack on the passengers in the back might have provoked a melee even sooner that ended with the failure of the mission.
Have you ever choked down something you didn’t particularly care for just to be polite?
And why do you think that?
Prior to 9/11 the US military did not routinely arm airplanes in US airspace. As someone else noted, the only option open to fighter pilots that day was ramming an airliner, basically a desperate kamikaze strategy.
Who gives a crap what “sort” of hero the passengers were? Rather than go passively to their deaths they chose to fight back. Rather than going down over a city where people on the ground would have surely been injured or killed the passenger uprising on Flight 93 resulted in only those on board dying, so the action probably did save lives on the ground.
Choosing to go down fighting and protect others even when it means your own death IS heroic. How dare you take that from them.
And you know this… how?
Do you have ANY experience in picking out landmarks from the air? I do.
Look at a freakin’ map, for goodness sake - the National Mall is a big swath of green rectangle in the middle of a city with the White House at the east end of it. It’s like an oversized green runway. You can see this in satellite photos, much less from 10,000 or 5,000 feet.
Oh, and you get easily get the latitude and longitude from Google or other sources and, you know, dial it into a GPS unit to guide you there. Holy crap, back even in 2000 there were hand-held Garmin units that made it easy to get to anywhere as long as you had valid coordinates. Not to mention all the aviation navaids that pilots - remember, the flying hijacker was an actual pilot - can use for guidance. Which we know from the black boxes he was actually using for navigation.
“Incredible difficulty”? F no.
The Secret Service will never give a definite, or even squishy, answer to White House defense equipment. Yes, it’s suspected the White House does but since no one has ever yet used a missile to defend it we don’t know for sure.
Yes. Result was crumpled Cessna, dead pilot, and I think they had to repaint some siding on the White House and put some grass divots back in place. A four seat Cessna is in no way comparable to a 757. It’s the difference between being hit by a kid on a tricycle and being run over by a freight train.
If we are talking about bravery, who had more; the passengers who simply acted on animalistic emotions of fear and anger or the 19 hijackers who knew in the late 90s that they would die for their god a few years later by taking on the most powerful empire in human history by attacking passenger planes where they risked being beaten up, arrested and being taken to a maximum security prison like Ramsi Yousef, the 93’ WTC bomber, and if succeeded would have to fly themselves into buildings not knowing what lies in death.
Tldr; The passenger’s on flight 93 are nothing special. The world should stop celebrating them. We don’t know what happened on that flight but fools like to assume that they beat the hijackers because most people want to maintain this good vs evil illusion.
Actually, we do know. Cell phone calls, cockpit voice recorders.
It would be a good idea to know what you’re talking about.
Most people will cling to every possible second of life rather than hasten the end. These people did the opposite.
ETA: And it wasn’t anger and fear. They knew the plane was targeted on buildings full of people. Even if the Capitol was evacuated, there’s a whole city surrounding it.
They worked to bring the plane down before reaching D.C.
They were fools who were so arrogant as to think that saving a few lives would have meant anything. I think someone needs to tell that to the family members. The world would not have ended if 5000 people as opposed to 3000 died that day. America would still be a country. Only a few weak minded family members would mourn.
And they certainly crashed the plane for nothing. Will they get special rewards in heaven. Unlikely. At least the hijackers did it for something they believed in. Defeating what they called the ‘Great Satan’
What’s so special about them is that weren’t anyone special - it was a demonstration that ordinary people don’t have to be passive sheep. It doesn’t matter if the actions of the hijackers or the passengers brought the airplane down, what matters is that it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania rather than the middle of a city.
And we actually do know quite a bit about the flight due to phone calls and the black boxes. Any more ignorance you’d care to demonstrate?
I think it means something to the people who didn’t die.
And talking about arrogant - suicide terrorists supposedly acting for a God that condemns suicide in their holy text? The people who convinced them to do that are the truly evil ones.
50 million died in WWII and the world didn’t end, what’s your point?
It speaks volumes about you that you think it’s “weak” to mourn the dead.
Who crashed the airplane? Are you claiming some special knowledge the rest of us don’t have?
See, the rest of us - you know, the ones who have some clue what we’re talking about here - freely admit we don’t know which side crashed the airplane. What made the passengers heroic is that were willing to take on murderers unarmed to reduce the harm they could cause. Whether it was they who crashed the airplane or the terrorists is irrelevant to that point.